In Past Show

About Jim Lambie

Though his first love is music, Jim Lambie is celebrated for his mixed-media sculptures and installations, into which he incorporates the detritus of popular culture and neon-bright colors to create hallucinatory, site-specific meditations on industry, art-making, and contemporary life. Claiming that he wants to set up “intense psychological spaces,” Lambie transforms various sites, including Scotland’s inaugural pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, while staying true to their architecture. In his “Zobops” works (begun 1999), which launched his career, he covers floors with multicolored strips of tape in patterns that simultaneously dissolve and follow architectural features. His practice is underpinned by his interest in color theory and music, the psychological resonance of space, and utopian artistic movements. Like rock-n-roll, Lambie’s work is edgy and exuberant, and surrounds viewers with a mashed-up vision of the world in which we live.

Scottish, b. 1964, Glasgow, United Kingdom, based in Glasgow, United Kingdom